Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday June 23, 2014 @02:06PM
from the the-circle-of-business dept.

An anonymous reader writes Oracle is buying hospitality and retail technology vendor Micros Systems for $5.3 billion, in a deal that will be its largest since the purchase of Sun Microsystems in 2010. "Oracle said the acquisition will extend its offerings by combining Micros' industry-specific applications with its business applications, technologies and cloud portfolio. Oracle expects the deal to immediately add to its adjusted earnings. Its stock climbed 18 cents to $41 before the market opened. Micros' board unanimously approved the transaction, which is expected to close in the second half of the year."

From an "enterprise-scale" company, which uses Oracle for their timesheet reporting, let me be the first to inform you that Oracle blows goats. The damn thing crashes if you try to type in text and enter number at the same time. We also have an Oracle database for parts which they've wanted to change for years. YEARS. But switching away is hard and costly and so we limp along with the system we have.

Oracle is where technology goes to die. And those rotting corpses are weighing down corporate America. Oracle

They have arguably the best RDBMS in the business, they have fat stacks of government contracts, and they obviously have an incredibly effective sales team. Seems like they actually have a lot going for them to me, even if they are horrible in every other way. Government customers don't give a shit about software freedom, or any other kind of freedom. Not this government, anyway.

Oracle is like the gold finger, everything they touch turns to gold and dies

As an ex-employee of Micros' retail division in Solon, Ohio, I can honestly say they do not need the help here. Micros (Retail) is already rotting from the inside out.

I do not expect Oracle coming in to save the day. There has already been too much brain drain and customers are already dropping them as a vendor. Big customers. Think $10 million and larger contracts, poof, like a fart in the wind.

I'm sure this also gets Oracle access to all of that tasty data, which they can monetize, sell, or otherwise mis-handle.

I also predict a lot of smaller businesses getting completely gouged by their new overlords on their licensing costs. What do you mean I need to buy a Solaris server with a 10 year service plan to get to my existing data?

Having worked directly with both of these companies, micros as a competing point of sale company and oracle as a base infrastructure for a telcom company, I can say both charge roughly the same for hourly support. On one hand, we still own all data that goes through oracle systems while micros owns the data on their point of sales computers. If you switch pos companies, you lose access to all historical data.

Micros Systems and and Sun Microsystems. If you don't want to get eaten by oracle as it tries to consolidate as people are not longer buying Oracle DB (Too expensive). You better make sure your name isn't like micro systems

I'd go farther: if you're a small business, plan on dumping Micros-anything ASAP. If you can reuse the hardware with someone else's software, great, but that's only an added benefit. Micros is now spoiled goods. Everyone and their mother is doing POS these days, I think it's time it became commoditized as an open source project.

When Oracle bought the company that produces the software packages I support management was of the opinion "Well... how bad can it really be?"Now their attitude is "For the love of God find a way to get us out of this contract!"

>They've already demonstrated very poor database selection skills, now they have to justify their previous mistakes.

Would you like to substantiate that?MySQL and MariaDB have worked fine for several years for my POS application. It has always been available.

If I did it again, I might drop SQL databases altogether. There are better ways. But as an SQL database, it has worked as intended. How would a different SQL database work better for my application. I suspect you don't know, because you don't know my

You appear full of FUD. I've never had to preventatively re-index in my life.

Name one of the better solutions.Amongst the wrong answers would be
1) Postgresql. Permissions management is a pig compared to MySQL
2) Oracle. It costs a lot of money
3) Microsoft Access. My POS runs on Linux.

You jest but it's happening.... Subway recently dumped them as a POS supplier and will not support any new Micros installs and are hesitant to support older ones. They moved on to HP and Par. We went with Par for what should be obvious reasons for our locations.

Personally, I think Windows-based POS systems are a catastrophe waiting to happen. Doesn't matter who the supplier is, the OS vendor remains the same in most cases.

If Subway ported their POS software to run on top on Linux or BSD I'd be a much hap

That's just retail therapy for Larry, seeing as how his bid to buy the Los Angeles Clippers along with David Geffen and Oprah Winfrey was sub-par. He lost out to Steve Ballmer's more baller offer, for LA's long-time underdog team.

I believe that Micros was one of the last big support contracts that Sybase still had. Now that Oracle owns them, you can be pretty guarantee that new version of Micros ReS will have an Oracle backend.

But, hey, Sybase is a Dead Division Walking already. When was the last time you heard about them getting a NEW Fortune 500 contract?

What does Oracle do that is both 1) good or great, and 2) not database? I was a part of an acquisition and worked for Oracle 4 months before jumping ship. What I saw was a wasteland of half-baked integration work on their acquisitions, and abandoned products, often multiple in the same area, and a strong streak of anti-"wasn't acquired or made here" syndrome. I've heard nothing but contempt for Oracle's consultants which is why everyone I dealt with outside my org worked with third party implementation, sup

I love Oracle-bashing for laughs as much as the next person, however, once the chuckling subsides, we're faced with the stark reality that Oracle continues to decimate good software at every chance they get. Look what they did to Siebel Analytics (Oracle "Business Intelligence" is now an oxymoron of epic proportions - forcing Siebel Analytics into a Weblogic paradigm has turned it into a piece of over-engineered bloatware the likes of which has rarely been seen in Software history) Why more companies are no

My thought about this after the purchase of Micros was "Do you want the combo meal or just the sandwich?"
Seeing that Oracle will only take the juiciest parts of them and discard the rest.at fire sale prices. (char broiled, no doubt...)